A tug of war over the Mayor’s story

Wednesday 20 March 2013 13:57 BST

One person who is rather surprised by Michael Cockerell’s documentary about the Mayor of London, The Irresistible Rise of Boris Johnson, is Boris’s biographer Sonia Purnell, author of Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. The documentary can be seen on BBC2 on Monday.

“I was a bit surprised when they borrowed my title,” says Sonia. Over to Cockerell: “We took our title from the Bertolt Brecht play written in 1941, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a Chicago mobster but also a parable for the rise of a populist charismatic strongman.

“We genuinely didn’t notice that the subtitle of the hardback edition of Sonia’s book, Just Boris, is The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. But the paperback edition is titled Just Boris, with the subtitle A Tale of Blond Ambition. Our programme is by no means based on her book. We talked to many people who did not talk to her.”